Description: The West Fjords are a series of
peninsulas in northwestern Iceland. They represent less than
one-eighth the country's land area, but their jagged perimeter
accounts for more than half of Iceland's total coastline.

(CNN) --Impressionism. Pointillism. Cubism. All the great
painting styles make an appearance at a new exhibit showcasing
breathtakingly bizarre and colorful images, created by mother
nature and a high-flying helper.

Dozens of portraits of our planet, currently on display at the
Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., were selected from more
than 400,000 pictures taken by the Landsat 7 satellite since
1999.

Mountains, deserts, islands and glaciers become haunting
abstract subjects, seen in brilliant blues, greens and reds from
a vantage point more than 400 miles away.

"Every now and then you have to stop and admire them for
their beauty instead of their science," said Jon
Christopherson, a researcher for the U.S. Geological Survey who
studies the Landsat 7 images.

A desert resembles marbled rock. A frozen lake is transformed
into a dragon. A multitude of tiny circles, each an irrigated
field, looks like something from French painter Georges Seurat.

Each of the 41 images was chosen for its artistic appeal
rather than scientific significance, the Library of Congress
said.

This is by far the greatest gift that mystical
experiences can bestow on us: to see --
really see -- all that is right with the world. Just as believers
in a beneficent deity
should be haunted by the problem of natural evil, so gnostics,
atheists, pessimists, and
nihilists should be haunted by the problem of friendship, love,
beauty, truth, humor,
compassion, fun. Never forget the problem of fun.

http://chronicle.com/free/v49/i14/14b00701.htm

DAVID
BOZZI

The
Static Channel

Late night televisionhisses staticfrom a narcoleptic
local station,
like an insomniatic catas I drift in the
hypnogogic state
and my coffee stained pajamas...

This whoooshing stuff,a radio image of
Big Bang first banging,whooshes everywherestill ringing
like the clang of a Big Bell...

Do not try to become
anything.
Do not make yourself into anything.
Do not be a meditator.
Do not become enlightened.
When you sit, let it be.
What you walk, let it be.
Grasp at nothing.
Resist nothing.
~Ajhan Chah

Rowan
Williams in "Writing in the Dust: After September 11"

HAVE COMPASSION FOR THE SUFFERING WORLD

The trauma can offer a breathing space; and in that space there
is the
possibility of recognizing that we have had an experience that is
not just a
nightmarish insult to us but a door into the suffering of
countless other
innocents, a suffering that is more or less routine for them in
their less
regularly protected environments.

And in the face of extreme dread, we may become conscious, as
people often
do, of two very fundamental choices. We can cling harder and
harder to the
rock of our threatened identity -- a choice, finally, for
self-delusion over
truth; or we can accept that we have no ultimate choice but to
let go, and
in that letting go, give room to what's there around us -- to the
sheer
impression of the moment, to the need of the person next to you,
to the fear
that needs to be looked at, acknowledged and calmed (not denied).
If that
happens, the heart has room for many strangers, near and far.
There is a
global hospitality possible too in the presence of death.

Read the Review:http://www.spiritualityhealth.com/newsh/items/bookreview/item_5086.html

The zebras are an endangered species in
their native habitat of northern Kenya,
where fewer than 5,000 remain.

Experience leaves only
memories behind and
adds to the burden which is heavy enough. You need no more
experiences. The past ones are sufficient. And if you feel
you need more, look into the hearts of people around you.
You will find a variety of experiences which you would not be able
to go through in a thousand years. Learn from the sorrows
of others
and save yourself your own. It is not experience that you
need, but the freedom from all experience.___ Nisargadatta

Wolfgang Pauli from his lecture on
science and Western thought, quoted by Werner
Heisenberg in the latter's article: "Embracing the Rational
and the Mystical", page 175
of "Quantum Questions" by Ken Wilber, Shambala.

"I believe, however, that to
anyone for whom a narrow rationalism has lost its
persuaveness, and to whom the charm of a mystical attitude,
experiencing the outer
world in its oppressive multiplicity as illusory, is also not
powerful enough, nothing
else remains but to expose oneself in one way or another to these
intensified
oppositions and their conflicts. Precisely by doing so, the
inquirer can also more or
less consciously tread an inner path to salvation. Slowly there
then emerge internal
images, fantasies or Ideas to compensate the outer situation, and
which show an
approach to the poles of the antitheses to be possible. Warned by
the miscarriage of all
premature endeavors after unity in the history of human thought,
I shall not venture to
make predictions about the future. But, contrary to the strict
division of the activity of
the human spirit into separate departments--a division prevailing
since the 19th
century--I consider the ambition of overcoming opposites,
including also a synthesis
embracing both rational understanding and the mystical experience
of unity, to be the
mythos, spoken or unspoken, of our present day and
age".

I am a mother. I am a son. I am a
doctor.
I am a lawyer. I'm musical. I'm tall.
I'm American. I am French. I am Jewish.
I am Christian. I am black. I am gay.
I am celibate. I'm depressed. I'm
happpy. I am this. I am that.

We all know ourselves in relation to something. We only know a
qualified "I".
When we say "I am" the mind demands
"What am I"? I am what? This book is
about the "I am" prior to all
qualification, what we are before the intrusion of the mind.

How can we know what cannot be qualified?

It calls for a kind of knowing, not
knowledge which comes from accumulation
of facts and experience. We may have absorbed every book
published and
experienced every adventure and it
would not bring us one step nearer to
knowing "I am". So this new knowing
begins with giving up looking for it
in experiences and second hand
information. Giving up does not mean we become passive; on the
contrary, in
letting go of our mechanical learned responses we are open to
full potential,
our creativity, a dynamic new realm.
The natural state of the relaxed brain
is multidimensional attention. It
does not need viewpoints, data, opinions,
memory to be alert. When all these directions cease, an organic,
non-directed wakefulness remains.
This is the threshold of "I am"?

Ahhhh How quickly they forget!
Humans are the only beings
that will bargain for a drink of
transcendence
from the depths of an ocean of grace.
But do not despair, Marley
you will be visited by an endless stream
of those sent to test your mettle,
the entire universe conspires
to bring us to ourselves,
once the challenge is issued.

~~~~~~~~~

"Faith is an oasis in
the heart
which will never be reached
by the caravan of thinking."